Unity getting new rendering, machine learning, and performance tools

Unity shared a glimpse of its Unity 2018 roadmap at GDC, explaining it'll be focusing on building out next level rendering, machine learning, and performance tools over coming months.

The company showcased a smorgasbord of new features during its opening keynote (available to watch above, or read on the Unity blog), which might be of interest if you're one of the many devs using the popular game engine.

Among those planned additions is a Scriptable Render Pipeline that allows for configurable, lean, user-centric rendering, and a GPU-based progressive lightmapper that gives instant feedback to artists during the process of tuning lights and baking at ~10x the speed.

Unity also intends to add Cinemachine Storyboarding, which is designed to aid developers who rough out their shots with Cinemachine and Timeline by letting them quickly construct and tweak grey-box levels and scenarios.

The engine maker also outlined its commitment to "democratized" machine learning, with Unity keen to lower the barrier to entry so more devs can make machine learning an integral part of their projects.

Beyond that, it pushed the notion of "performance by default," and said it's been working on a new high-performance multithreaded system that makes it possible for games to fully utilize the current crop of multicore processors without any headaches.

"This is all possible thanks to the new C# Job System, a new way to write performant code by default utilizing our Entity Component System," added the company, explaining how that system works.

"This is coupled with a new math-aware, backend compiler technology named Burst. Burst takes the C# jobs and produces highly optimized code for any platform you’re building to."